


Hilarion

by constantine



Series: Sketches for But If You Close Your Eyes [1]
Category: Frontier Wolf - Rosemary Sutcliff, SUTCLIFF Rosemary - Works
Genre: Fanart, Freckles, Gen, Inspired by Fanfiction, facial scars from canon levels of violence?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 20:15:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5640481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constantine/pseuds/constantine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character portraits done while reading Sineala's But If You Close Your Eyes.<br/>Pencil, black and white.<br/>Warning for medium(?) freckle levels, scars from canon-typical violence, and some references there-to in the notes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hilarion

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [But If You Close Your Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1370032) by [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala). 



 

 

I have no pitch for why you should read this story. It has time-travel and star/...time-travel...-crossed pining (sort of), and delicate shading of Alexios' emotions, and if you haven't/don't want to read it then I cannot help here. I just drew some faces.

      Notes:

  * Pretty sure I could hear the authors of all the How To Draw Comics books I read in middle school crying out in agony as I did this. (Edit: because you're Not Supposed to pile this much on someone's face, if you did not devote as much time to hate-reading as I did. This is good design advice, it's just not always how humans look.) Wanted to try some atrophic scarring--mostly light and contour to differentiate them from the surrounding skin, rather than lines or shading--and had fun mixing in freckles, color on a smooth (ish) surface. I’m leery of Drama Scars but I conversely love when injury and how you react to it are just…things that can be in stories, and this one had what I wanted on that front.  _Note on scar formation is at bottom_ , if you don't feel the need for that.


  * The shorter hair than I would otherwise use for the book seemed appropriate in text: I went with less freckle density as well because while crunching over the How To Draw rules please me, I must sometimes yield to reason. (He looked objectively like a strawberry with Plague.) (I may be used to a higher degree of freckle than most people?) Please don’t ask how many times I decided that his ear was Not Right. Ears are as distinct as fingerprints and they are Very Important to making someone look like themselves and I needed to change it, okay. 


  * **Research!** consisted of a general review of Greco-Roman signet rings from before the appropriate period, and…lifting the first uniform tunic from the right century I found, which was in an Eye Witness book. (Don’t try to tell me you don’t still have yours.) Look, not even this book is getting me to engage with technicalities of Roman culture on the open internet.


  * Yes, I went with Roman and not Brittonic. All I can say is that that means I would have spent even longer picking something than if I went with the Eye Witness, and I made a choice.


  * I decided to assume that the remaining officers would probably have changed into more standard kit of the army proper in Onnum, since they would have to take replacements from the warehouses there, and then stay in pretty much that until they settle in in Gallia Belgica and adopt whatever works for there. (I also assumed/hoped he changed in Onnum because if I had to pick a key detail of Sineala’s story, it is that at some point Hilarion is allowed in the same room as the Roman Emperor, probably while his face is still in two pieces. They’re both impossible to talk to. How did that conversation go?)


  * Alexios describes him as dressing plainly, but Alexios would be used to a certain degree of details. There’s a difference between someone wearing only solid-color clothing, and someone who dresses exclusively in clothes that came in those Hanes multi-packs: one is personal taste and the other becomes off-putting pretty quick. This is plain in cultural context? That line might also be more about the jewelry.


  * Yes, I would have made it solid-colored, culturally indeterminate, and skipped this, except that there is a line between simplicity and ‘are you sure you finished this?’ and it is dangerously thin. Yes, I thought this out after I did it. (I dare you to tell me whether this or the ear thing was a more important question, okay.)



 

  Atrophic scars--sunken where flesh has been lost--are generally pale in the later stages, matching the description (I went with late stage fibroids rather than the half-healed scar specified because...I forgot, apparently), and they don't have the dramatic size of hypertrophic or keloidal scars, so I spent a while debating the relative width and depth for a wound caused by sword-blow to face, the area that would be affected, and...well, how much that would 'look' like what it was supposed to.

  My conclusion was that the story implies there was no major bone damage, as I would otherwise have gone with at the jaw, and that limited facial motion would result from facial muscles having been lost in a broad wound, or cut a not realigned, rather than being distorted by the scar itself, so I didn't make that very obvious around the mouth. The burn scar is non-keloidal because I draw a lot of keloids (yes) and I felt like taking a break from 'rubbery masses' even if they are more impressive. (Also I got diverted by the question of whether very freckly people have any different rates of keloid formation than un-freckly people of the same skin tone, to which the answer so far seems to be that no one else cares enough to look into this.)

  I'm going to say that Alexios has a lower standard of what is a really gnarly scar than we might now because many wounds that we see today wouldn't be survivable, either with the standard of care or the practicalities of getting someone off a battlefield to get them that care (and surgery would be more likely to involve large removal of tissue without reconstruction, pointing again to atrophic rather than hypertrophic). Also he hasn't seen TV special effects. 


End file.
